Ritual Experience Research Articles

The Role of Social Media in the Religiosity of Islamic Adolescents Through a Descriptive Qualitative Approach

This research aims to analyze and determine the role of social media in influencing religious doctrinal, ritual experiences, and socio-religious interactions among students at SMA Negeri 1 Cibitung. Qualitative with a phenomenological approach is the type researchers apply and use for this research, the data sources used are primary and secondary data. The data techniques collection used are depth interviews, and FGD (Focus Group Discussion). The research results show that social media helps students think about religion, increase their level of religiosity, obey religious commandments, and remember God more often. In addition, online communities on social media play an important role in supporting religiosity through interaction, discussion, and moral and emotional support. Although there is a small percentage of students who feel confused about certain religious concepts, the majority feel helped by the content they consume on social media. This research provides new contributions in understanding how social media can be used as an effective tool to support religious education and practice among the zillennial generation.

THE DETERRITORIALIZATION CULTURE OF ISLAMIC BOARDING SCHOOLS: A NETNOGRAPHY STUDY OF LIVE STREAMING USERS OF KULIAH IHYA' TEMATIK AND NGARIKSA ON FACEBOOK

The teaching tradition of Islamic boarding schools has encountered deterritorialization. Islamic boarding schools that used to be distinguished by traditionality have transformed the management, financial, and learning traditions following digital developments. This article aims to examine the substantial shift in Islamic boarding school intellectual traditions from traditional to digital, which will then be called 'online recitation’, through live Facebook streaming content of Kuliah Ihya' Tematik (Ihya' Thematic Lectures) and Ngariksa (Questioning). The data were collected through documentation, surveys, and in-depth interviews involving kyai, production teams, and online santri (student) of two Facebook accounts: Ulil Abshar Abdalla (Ihya' Thematic Lectures) and Oman Fathurahman (Ngariksa). Data was analyzed using netnography through investigation, interaction, immersion, integration, and incarnation stages. The results showed values, rituals, heroes, and symbols in the deterritorialization culture of Islamic boarding schools. Followers of the online recitation get a social experience (becoming more sensitive to social issues) and a ritual experience (calmness in living life) after participating in the Ngaji online through live streaming or recorded playback. Research contributes to the development of Islamic communication science where Islamic boarding schools as the oldest Islamic educational institutions in Indonesia can communicate to the wider community about learning activities in Islamic boarding schools through social media which is of great interest to the public.

Ritual networks and the structure of moral communities in Classic Maya society

Ritual plays an important integrative function in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of human society. The shared experience of ritual establishes strong bonds between individuals that defines their membership in certain social groups. However, rituals are not timeless traditions, nor do they simply restore social equilibrium. Rather, rituals are active and ongoing social processes that unite and divide across multiple social categories. This paper applies archaeological network methods to analyze the multiscalar structure of ritual traditions across Classic Maya (ca. 300–900 CE) society using hieroglyphic inscriptions from dated and provenienced monuments cataloged in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Looper and Macri 1991–2024). For the Classic Maya, public ritual and performance were highly charged political events where meaning and power could be negotiated, creating opportunities for identity formation and community integration. Such contexts helped establish strong moral bonds in Classic Maya society. However, we know relatively little about the specific forms and content of these ritual practices. In this study we construct ritual similarity networks from hieroglyphic inscriptions to analyze the structure and organization of these moral communities as well as the ritual relations that bound them together.

Рассказ А. И. Макаровой-Мирской «Камланье»: историко-литературный комментарий

The paper presents the first examination of the sources of a shamanic ritual storyline in the short story “Kamlan’e” (Shamanic séance/ritual) by A. I. Makarova-Mirskaya published in the collection “Altayskie rasskazy” (Altai stories) in 1912. The writer fictionalizes the ethnographic material and integrates it into the literary plot frame of “a child watching a shaman’s kamlan’e from a hiding place.” The main character is an Altai boy brought to the shaman by his parents. The young boy observes a sacrificial act during his first experience of a shamanic ritual. Horrified by this experience, he runs away, gets lost, and eventually finds refuge with a family of Russian Orthodox settlers. When the parents find the child, he does not want to see the kamas; he wants them to leave Altai. Thus, the story features both psychologism and criticism of shamanic rituals, combined with a detailed ethnographic depiction of the performance. The narration includes a passage in the Altai language: a speech of the shaman during the various stages of the ritual, each commented on and explained. The depiction of the shamanic ceremony aligns with the accounts published in the Tomsk periodical press in 1869 and 1890. The primary sources for all those texts were the notes of V. I. Verbitsky, published in 1893 as a book titled “Altayskie inorodtsy” (Altai aliens). It is worth mentioning that the book, being addressed to children, was intended to be both educational and highly moral.

Reading the Gospel of Luke's Walk to Calvary as a Funeral Procession: A Study of Luke 23.27–8

AbstractThis study offers a fresh explanation for the characterisation of the women in Luke 23.27 as mourning. It argues that the uniquely Lukan material of women mourning on the walk to Calvary subtly fashions that walk into a funeral procession. The phrase μὴ κλαίɛτɛ in the following verse, Luke 23.28, recalls accounts of Jesus bringing the dead to life earlier in the Gospel, thereby evoking the concept of resurrection. Luke 23.27-8 works in conjunction with material later in Chapter 23 about the ritual preparation of Jesus’ body, to portray funerary ritual for Jesus conducted in reverse (the funeral procession precedes rather than follows the preparation of the body). This inverted order of funeral allusions adds extra resonance to the endpoint of the Gospel, casting it as the logical culmination of a reverse funeral—the resurrection of Jesus from death to life. The interpretation in this paper highlights one way that lived ritual experiences among the Gospel's readers, in this case, the paradigm of funeral ritual, informed the narrative technique in the Gospel of Luke, complementing other well-recognised uses of Greco-Roman rhetorical devices and literary themes.

W. A. Mozart’s Litaniae lauretanae Compositions and the Loreto Pilgrimage

The Litaniae lauretanae (the Litany of Loreto), a Marian litany with medieval roots, has been set numerous times in polyphony, as well as in grand settings with soloists and orchestra, to be performed all over Catholic Europe. Famous musicians who composed settings of the Litany of Loreto include Orlando di Lasso, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Claudio Monteverdi, Heinrich Biber, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This article discusses Mozart’s two settings of the Litaniae lauretanae that were composed in May 1771 and in 1774. The analysis of parts of Mozart’s settings in the light of the historical background of Loreto pilgrimages and the litany’s ritual and musical uses highlights some of their remarkable musical features. It is argued that Mozart’s settings, more than any other major contemporary ones, constitute musical reenactments of ritual experience.

Gender and Genre: Women's Performance Practices in Dersim

Abstract Significant numbers of ethnographic studies from different parts of the world emphasize lament as a women's genre, with cross-cultural analyses indicating that women predominate among the genre's performers. These performances are often signified by ritual wailing, but researchers typically overlook how the genre is given ritual form through mundane activities in everyday life. Everyday experience and ritual experience are often cast as contradictory. Everyday speech and poetic discourse have been mainly separated in the literature. Rather than positing two distinct selves opposed to each other in everyday speech and in performance, it makes more sense to argue that the poetic self may contain contradictory statements. Focusing on the women's performance practices in Dersim, a region in eastern Turkey, where Zazaki- and Kurdish-speaking Alevis live, I consider how classification of genres relates to gender and power. Rather than associating the possibility of raising one's voice with resisting the social order, I attempt to explore the genre's contextualization process and its connections to women's agency.

ИНИЦИАЦИЯ В ИНТЕРАКТИВНЫХ ВИЗУАЛЬНЫХ НОВЕЛЛАХ КАК РИТУАЛЬНАЯ ПРАКТИКА ЦИФРОВОЙ СРЕДЫ

In the article, using the example of interactive visual novels, the problem of analyzing new forms of human sensory experience in the era of digitalization is considered. The central theme is a digitized initiation ritual presented as part of the sensory experience of the player in the interactive novels. The logic of rethinking and artistic reflection of the archaic ritual in fairy tales is revealed, the plot of which has become the most popular in the computer games industry through the fantasy genre. The channels and mechanisms for involving the player in the initiatory plot through various channels are described. First, through the interactive interaction of the player with the media. Secondly, through the visual component of the video game. And, thirdly, through verbal means – a text that reveals the plot. The process of building internal and external communication is analyzed: between the player and the authors of the interactive visual novel; player and electronic media; the player and the historical Other – the bearer of the initial experience of the initiation ritual. The question is raised about the functions of interactive visual novels through which the player’s technological experience is transformed into a sensual one. The reasons for the actualization of the plot of initiation in popular culture are considered, in particular, in the segment of video games, which includes interactive visual novels.

Re-Picturing the Reception of the Spirit with Ritual Experience: The Role of Baptism in 1 Corinthians 12:13

In this article, I argue that the ritual experience of water-baptism plays an essential role in Paul's metaphorical expression and rhetorical purpose in 1 Corinthians 12:13. To explore the role of baptism, I use conceptual blending theory from cognitive linguistics to define and demonstrate the metaphorical ways in which ritual functions in the human mind. In so doing, I emphasize the performance of a ritual itself and the contextual perception of its performance, arguing for a metaphorical relationship between the two. I apply conceptual blending analysis to interpret the complex interplay of three metaphors in 1 Corinthians 12:13. I argue that Paul forms a conceptual blend of three metaphors in this verse, and that baptism, the water-rite, plays a pivotal role in this blend by providing the physical pattern of immersion and the cultural understanding of this immersion as a new belonging. Using baptism, Paul achieves his purpose of re-picturing the reception of the Spirit and appealing for social union. This verse thus presents an excellent case of the role of ritual in the emergence of early Christianity and the explanatory power of ritual studies to the New Testament texts.

Representing and Experiencing Islamic Domes: Images, Cosmology, and Circumambulation

Lindsay Jones developed the concept of “ritual-architectural event”, according to which the meaning of a sacred building depends upon the participant’s experience of it in the course of the rituals they perform. Starting from such approach, and taking the Islamic dome as my subject-matter, I examine the correlations that link architectural forms, ritual performance, and participants’ experience into a whole. I first survey a corpus of images related to domes in two types of manuscripts (poetry, and pilgrimage narratives), showing how these images suggest cosmological patterns. The second part unfolds these representations, proceeding from cosmology to ritual. The third and last part focuses on circumambulation as the ritual experience that best embodies the previously identified cosmological patterns. The connection between the three dimensions discussed here is ascertained by the fact that the combination of circle and square structures relates both to Islamic graphic representations and ritual practices. An aesthetic/spiritual experience is awakened both in the mind and in the bodily senses of the viewer/practitioner: When Muslims stand under a dome, in front of the mihrab, thus facing Mecca, and when they behold the dome under which they stand, the view of this circular space possibly translates into a kind of mental and spiritual circumambulation. The conclusion suggests that the meaning attached to sacred architecture places is triggered by a complex of interactions between patterns referred respectively to the mind, bodily actions, and cultural settings.

Virtual Daime: When Psychedelic Ritual Migrates Online.

During the 2020 COVID-19 epidemic a variety of social activities migrated online, including religious ceremonies and rituals. One such instance is the case of Santo Daime, a Brazilian rainforest religion that utilizes the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca in its rituals. During the pandemic, multiple Santo Daime rituals involving the consumption of ayahuasca took place online, mediated through Zoom and other online platforms. The phenomenon is notable since the effects of hallucinogens are defined by context (set and setting) and Santo Daime rituals are habitually governed by punctilious regulations aimed at directing the experience of participants. The abrupt move to online space thus augurs significant implications in the context of hallucinogenic rituals. This paper looks at this development and its repercussions for entheogenic rituals, as it asks how do psychedelic rituals change when they move online? Building on the author’s previous work on set and setting in the Santo Daime religion, the paper introduces accounts from 12 semi-structured interviews with daimistas participating in online daime rituals, approached through the prism of set and setting, and the study of online religiosity. The analysis points at several key dynamics emerging in the context of virtual rituals. The migration online allowed for the continuation of Santo Daime entheogenic rituals at a time of social distancing, fostered a sense of global brotherhood and opened new possibility for religious participation and learning. Concurrently, online ritual produced an impoverished ritual experience and novel types of challenges including a higher potential for distractions, technical difficulties, and low sensory fidelity. Other novel challenges included social anxiety and an in-built tension between the social and spiritual dimensions of ritual. Finally, some participants were concerned by the cultural context of online rituals: technological mediation, consumerism, commodification, and digital divide. The limitations of digital technology appear amplified by the highly immersive, body oriented, experientially intensified context of the psychedelic experience. This paper contributes to the literature on the extra-pharmacological factors shaping experiences with psychedelics, as well as to the literature on the consequences of the adoption of digital media technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rituals as a Control Mechanism in Human Trafficking: Systematic Review and Thematic Synthesis of Qualitative Literature

ABSTRACT Spiritual rituals have potential for misuse as a form of control in human trafficking. A lack of understanding of this process can lead to challenges in supporting trafficking survivors. This article is a metasynthesis of systematically reviewed qualitative literature on ritual use in human trafficking, providing insight into ritual practices and their impact. Relevant qualitative research was identified via blind screening. A total of 3087 studies were screened; 24 met inclusion criteria. Data were analyzed using thematic synthesis, yielding eight themes incorporating 27 sub-themes: These were 1) background vulnerabilities that make a ritual a powerful control mechanism, 2) trafficker intention to exploit, 3) power and consent issues in agreement to a ritual and contract, 4) powerful and often frightening ritual experiences, 5) control mechanisms arising from the ritual experience, 6) impact of the ritual on the victim, 7) challenges for the victim in leaving and getting help, and 8) successes in helping survivors who have escaped exploitation. We offer an illustrative framework for considering the relationship between rituals and human trafficking. We discuss implications for policy making that empowers trafficking survivors and promotes just outcomes within legal, governmental and health care systems.

Applied theatre for military personnel in recovery: creativity, agency, and re-imagining the self

ABSTRACT Self@arts is a performing arts programme delivered to Australian Defence Force personnel undergoing rehabilitation for physical and/or psychological injuries. In contrast to the cognitive emphasis within the dominant therapeutic arts model, self@arts provides participants with agency for re-narrating the self through a transformative, ritual experience of creativity. This is achieved by drawing on the body and voice pedagogies of Jacques Lecoq and Cicely Berry. The benefits of this approach are illustrated via semi-structured interviews and creative works produced in the programme, which suggest that the participants achieved heightened psychophysical experiences and consequently improved confidence, well-being, and a sense of self.

Religion and the COVID-19 pandemic: mediating presence and distance

ABSTRACT This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Grounded in ethnography and media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Mormon eschatology, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spirit mediums, the virtual Burning Man festival, Sufi sonic meditations, and televised Shia Muslim mourning. These studies collectively demonstrate that in pandemic rituals (1) Media are reflexive and enchanted; (2) The religious sensorium is sticky and lingers in embodied and mnemonic ways even under new circumstances of mediation; (3) Space and time emerge as modular, transposable, condensed, yet expanding. Ritual innovations can provoke new kinds of mediations, sensory engagements, and temporal-spatial arrangements, while revealing continuities with pre-pandemic cosmologies, theologies, liturgies, and social hierarchies, and relying on memories of previous ritual sensory experiences.

Making Sense of the Psalms

AbstractThis article discusses the appropriation of psalms in contemporary Dutch and Flemish culture through their performances in ‘extra-ecclesial’ settings and the ways in which aesthetics and embodied experiences play a role in this appropriation. Drawing on postsecular theory, we describe how both religious and secular dimensions are manifest in the performance of psalms on the level of aesthetics. Our contribution is a detailed analysis of empirical research data regarding different sensory perceptions (bodily, auditory, visual, synaesthetic), which we have studied both in isolation and interrelation. We show that religious and secular dimensions become intertwined in the temporally and spatially organized stimulation of different senses. A balancing act takes place between synaesthetic immersion in a collective ritual, and a more distanced, unisensory involvement to maintain individual authenticity. In this balance, an immersive ritual experience can become fertile soil for interaction with the transcendent. We argue that a postsecular stance should entail the interrogation and contextualization of immanent/transcendent dichotomies.

Sound and Ritualistic Language in Charles Williams’ War in Heaven

Abstract This study uncovers a link between sound patterns and ritualistic language in Charles Williams’ novels through an analysis of the relationship between type of sound and content. The study focuses on War in Heaven with a view to conducting a preliminary exploration into this link, and establishing possibilities for future research. Like Williams’ other novels, War in Heaven is saturated with the symbolism and ritual practices he learned in The Fellowship of the Rosy Cross and, potentially, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Williams’ experimentation with sound to convey his experience of ritual is explored through the framework of Roman Jakobson’s “Poetic Function”, to establish how Williams may have intended sound to contribute to the experience of the reader. Using a data driven approach, the study explores how sound patterns work with ritualistic content across War in Heaven, discovering a link between fricative sounds and ritualistic events.

Re-Picturing the Reception of the Spirit with Ritual Experience: The Role of Baptism in 1 Corinthians 12:13

In this article, I argue that the ritual experience of water-baptism plays an essential role in Paul's metaphorical expression and rhetorical purpose in 1 Corinthians 12:13. To explore the role of baptism, I use conceptual blending theory from cognitive linguistics to define and demonstrate the metaphorical ways in which ritual functions in the human mind. In so doing, I emphasize the performance of a ritual itself and the contextual perception of its performance, arguing for a metaphorical relationship between the two. I apply conceptual blending analysis to interpret the complex interplay of three metaphors in 1 Corinthians 12:13. I argue that Paul forms a conceptual blend of three metaphors in this verse, and that baptism, the water-rite, plays a pivotal role in this blend by providing the physical pattern of immersion and the cultural understanding of this immersion as a new belonging. Using baptism, Paul achieves his purpose of re-picturing the reception of the Spirit and appealing for social union. This verse thus presents an excellent case of the role of ritual in the emergence of early Christianity and the explanatory power of ritual studies to the New Testament texts.

Sufism, subjectivity and parapsychology: refashioning the dirbāsha ritual among Sufis in modern Iraq

Abstract This paper explores the ritual of the dirbāsha as an extraordinary miracle performance and its role as a bodily practice in the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities among the Qādiriyya-Kasnazāniyya Sufi communities in Iraq. During the climax of collective dhikr gatherings, male Sufi novices perform extraordinary and dangerous acts, perforating parts of their bodies with swords or long skewers without seriously injuring themselves. From the Sufi perspective, this ritual is, first of all, interpreted as the miracle of a Sufi shaykh and not of the performing Sufi novice since it is seen as an expression and proof of God’s power as transmitted through the shaykh. Moreover, it has been argued that the ritual is constitutive for the formation of the religious subjectivity of the performing Sufi novice since it allows the embodiment of mystical concepts as emotional, sensorial and existential realities. For the individual ritual experience to work, the social construction and constant reframing of these “miracles” needs to be taken into account as well, namely the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary which allow the miracles to be perceived as such. The present case of the Kasnazāniyya will show how Sufis combined their pious with a modern, critical and self-reflexive subjectivity and successfully managed to reframe this highly controversial practice – which is criticised by religious reformists and secularists alike – beyond its traditional ritual context with the modern science of parapsychology.

Ritual pain: sensation, representation and self-presentation in the fire-walking ritual of La Réunion, Indian Ocean

ABSTRACT During the Hindu fire-walking festival in La Réunion, practitioners “feel the fire”, an expression which refers to feelings of pain. Yet in this religious milieu, pain is a subject which is circumvented outside the immediate family circle even if pain is necessary to validate the ritual experience. This article abjures the prevailing medical materialist approaches to the analysis and explanation of how fire-walking is possible. It focusses instead on the ways of feeling and living pain from the fire-walkers’ own points of view. The concept of edgework is introduced, which refers to voluntary risk-taking activities that navigate the edges that exist between cultural boundaries and also push personal boundaries (due to the endangerment of the person). During this ritual, and through pain, practitioners sculpt a new perception of themselves and of their world. It is shown that pain, when chosen and mastered such as in fire-walking, is not only world-shattering but also life-enhancing. When pain arises from a ritual act, as herein, it can become a tool to fight suffering, to discipline oneself, to better know oneself, and, it even allows an individual to experience happiness.

‘It's medicine to me’: Examining coping resources and strategies utilized in the sweat lodge ritual experience to improve health of Mexican Americans

This study contributes a critical Indigenous-based framework to minority stress process theory to study Mexican American health and well-being. Using qualitative methodology, we examine how a sense of connection to Indigeneity and group singing and drumming cultivated within sweat lodge experiences buffer stress and improve the well-being of Mexican Americans. We draw from 52 in-depth interviews with Indigenous-identifying Mexican American adults from disadvantaged positions, who collectively participate in sweat lodge ceremonies throughout Los Angeles and the Central Valley of California as part of their communities of practice. Findings reveal: (1) sweat lodges are sacred spiritual ceremonies that enhance participants’ sense of connection to Indigenous identity, ancestry, and culture; (2) this connection serves as a symbolic and active coping strategy vis-à-vis singing and drumming during sweat lodges; (3) singing and drumming helps moderate stressors by stimulating symbolic memory and positive emotions that help regulate negative emotions; and (4) all of this results in perceived improved well-being, though it varies in duration based on the symbolism and emotional energy derived from the ritual experience as reported by respondents. The study demonstrates how Indigeneity is a coping resource and Native singing and drumming are coping strategies that enhance positive emotions during sweat lodge ceremonies, which helps ameliorate stress to improve the overall well-being of Mexican American participants. We conclude by discussing implications for interventions to strengthen positive coping and health in Mexican Indigenous communities.